We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  I don’t want to talk about him, Park almost said. Instead she shook her head and said, “I still don’t understand what they think they’ll get out of this.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Sagara answered, with a hint of his old waspishness. “Though I have my theories. My guess is that they originally planned on claiming this planet for themselves: they’d root out the ISF loyalists, freeze or murder them, and colonize the place as a new home—probably using the Fold or Taban as hostages, to keep ISF away. Before we landed, my contacts back in Corvus informed me that ISF had discovered encrypted messages being sent to the ship’s computer, though they hadn’t figured out what they said or who they were being sent to when I last spoke with them. They were tracking down the source as we spoke.” He adjusted his leg; Park resisted the urge to see how it was doing. The regeneration process could sometimes look gruesome. “My guess is that one of our mutineer’s friends or family members was making arrangements, maybe buying passage on an unregistered ship. The plan might have been for the others to claim this place for themselves, and their families would come later.”

  Then he looked off to the side and smiled to himself in a crooked way, the expression full of bitter irony. This time Park did read his expression. “But they weren’t expecting the nightmares,” she said.

  Sagara chuckled, as if he did find pleasure in their mistake. “No,” he said, “it seems they didn’t. They might have thought this place could support human life, if Taban had survived on his own for so long—but of course, he hadn’t, and it wasn’t the utopia they probably expected. And when the nightmares started, infecting our crew left and right, they knew they couldn’t stay.”

  Now Park did knead her temples. “So they decided to take over the ship and take it elsewhere,” she said. “Flee colonized space altogether and find a new home. It makes sense, in theory. But the amount of work it took . . .”

  “It’s almost admirable, isn’t it?” Sagara drawled—though his look told her she’d be unwise to agree. “First they had Chanur freeze Reimi, so their tampering with the ship wouldn’t be noticed: no one was around with the knowledge to discover or undo their sabotage. Then they took down communications, using the excuse of the solar storm, so that none of us could tell ISF that something was amiss.”

  “You knew it all along,” Park said in dismay. And here she thought he’d been an out-of-touch paranoiac. But it was she who’d been led astray, by her naïveté, by her trust, by . . . .

  She wrenched her mind away from the next thought. Fulbreech’s scent of leather in sunlight came to her suddenly, and she had to blink against the sudden smarting in her nose and eyes. Sagara said, “No, I didn’t know the entire time—or not enough. I only really pieced it together when you ran into the bridge, bloodied and screaming. Or perhaps when Hunter manifested her symptoms, and they were all so quick to consign her to the freezer. Before that, I didn’t know who to trust, or even if anything was really going on. I was suspicious when Kisaragi suddenly became ill, with Chanur so vague on the reasons for her freezing, but I was willing to chalk it up to a medical misfortune. Then everything that happened after—it felt wrong, but that could have been the planet, the strangeness of the Fold. You were seeing ghosts of Taban’s dead body, when I knew you could have never seen it in real life. That threw me off. Were all the things I was suspecting of others really due to the supernatural? Quantum physics I didn’t understand?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know how much was . . . human-caused.” Then he shook his head. “For a while I thought it was the non-conscripted I had to keep an eye on, and that distracted me, too. Of course it was the other way around. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.”

  Somehow his confidence that he would live to avoid his past mistakes reassured her. “We know Holt and Ma had the nightmares,” she said. “And Hunter. Do you think Keller really had them?”

  “I know she had some trouble down below with sleepwalking,” he answered. “But whether she was frozen due to that, or because she found out about what the others were plotting . . .”

  “Taban said it was because she tried to let him out,” Park mused. “Maybe it was both?”

  Sagara rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know. What we do know is that, shortly after Holt’s nightmares, the others decided it was no longer worth staying on this planet and that they’d be better off looking for a new one. To do that, they had to bypass the protocols on the ship and take control for themselves.”

  “So Natalya staged a distraction,” Park said, echoing what he had said in the bridge. “She knew we were concerned about Hunter, waited until no one was watching her, and turned her loose. That was when they were fighting in the cafeteria.”

  Sagara nodded. “While the others—meaning Boone—took advantage of the commotion to go for the bridge. Of course, he’s an idiot, so it didn’t work, resulting in the blackout that I had to go and rescue you from.”

  She nearly laughed. “No wonder you thought I was one of them,” she said. “How suspicious it must have seemed . . .” Then she paused, feeling something wedge against her chest. “The question is, why wasn’t it Ful—someone more tech-savvy who went? Instead of Boone?”

  “It’s possible he backed down at that point,” Sagara said, unblinking. “Perhaps he didn’t want to participate any longer, until they forced his hand by killing Wick. That would have been good ammunition. ‘You see, if you’d just done your part and hacked the ship for us the first time, Wick wouldn’t be dead. You should cooperate with us more if you want to avoid bloodshed for others.’ Or perhaps they’d argued, after the ordeal with Hunter—when he sided with you—and perhaps they just didn’t trust him anymore.”

  She refused to feel any sympathy or pity for him. “So after Boone failed and the power went out . . .”

  “They went for Wick,” Sagara said grimly. “And he would have refused to hand over power, so Boone killed him—and then conveniently used your vision of ‘the stranger’ to cover his tracks.”

  “So you’re saying it’s my fault?” Park felt miserable. “My fault that Wick died?”

  Sagara stared at her. “Not at all. They would have killed him no matter what you did—and they would have found some other excuse, if yours wasn’t available. Hunter killed him. He fell and hit his head. I don’t know.” His mouth twisted again. “It was my fault they killed him. I was tasked with keeping everyone on this ship safe. But they outsmarted me. I didn’t know who could be trusted.”

  “They outnumbered you,” Park said, and now she did touch ankles with him—it was the only gesture of comfort she could manage. Sagara smiled, only faintly. “And me. It’s not either of our faults.” Again she thought of Fulbreech and felt that twisting, burning sensation inside of her.

  Then she remembered what came next and groaned. “And they had me side against you—to look for this man they claimed was the killer, when they knew all along he must be dead! You were right to lock us up.” She shivered suddenly; the cold was starting to get to her. “But why let me out of my room? They could have easily done something nefarious without me around.”

  Sagara paused for a moment, as if gauging her potential reaction. Finally he said, “Now that I think about it, it may have been Fulbreech. Likely they realized they needed him, with his proficiency with METIS, since they’d failed to take it over on their own—and perhaps they realized, too, that he couldn’t stomach killing. Maybe I was wrong, and they didn’t hold Wick’s death over him—maybe they didn’t tell him who was responsible at all. Maybe they went along with the ruse that it was someone else who had done it, to make him easier to coax along. If they asked him to do things for their rebellion, he might balk—but if there was a murderer on board, and they needed his access to the system to survive, he’d do it.”

  The fool, she thought. “So to keep him happy, they went along with the lie,” she said. “And that meant letting him let me out and go on the hunt for this imaginary p
erson.” Somehow the thought brought her little comfort—though if he hadn’t come to release her, she never would have found Taban and discovered the truth. Where would they be then?

  Sagara said, “I suppose that was when they convinced him to fully override the controls and give command to Boone. They never expected it to default to me after Wick’s death; they probably fed him a story about how I couldn’t be trusted if I didn’t believe there was a murderer around. A stranger, I should say: I knew someone on board was a murderer, and it wasn’t Taban.” He looked thoughtful. “Maybe their grand ‘hunt for the killer’ would have ended in my death—or even yours.”

  Her spine crawled. “If they meant to kill me, they would have done it by now,” she said. But of course, Natalya had tried to kill her down in the utility rooms. And Boone couldn’t have brought her down to the lower decks to murder her out of sight . . . could he?

  Why not? she asked herself. He would have had the perfect excuse to give to Fulbreech: that she’d been attacked by the mysterious stranger. The same one who had killed Wick. And yes, Fulbreech might have grieved—might have—but his sadness would have soon been overtaken by his mission to reclaim his family and freedom. Wouldn’t it?

  “They have less to trade if we’re both dead,” Park said.

  Sagara lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Yes, but they have the robot,” he said. “He—it—is what ISF really wants. The two of us are just extra insurance in case something happens to it. We’re afterthoughts.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. The hum of the freezer was somehow deep and comforting, something that vibrated down in her bones, and she was almost lulled. Now the cold was fading again—it was a distant thing, muted, something she was dimly aware of but couldn’t really feel. Had they raised the temperature to prevent hypothermia, after all? Or was this strange disconnectedness a result of something else? Her head injury, a concussion, or even . . . ?

  “Now it’s your turn,” Sagara said, breaking through her thoughts. Park lifted her head and blinked. She had almost dozed off, her cheek resting against the icy wall. “What did you learn from Taban? You mentioned the nightmares, that they’re not what they seem. And something called the unity rain.”

  “You’ve never spoken to him?” she asked, trying for time to collect her thoughts.

  Sagara shook his head. “I’ve never even been down there. I was told it wasn’t necessary.” He looked sardonic. “My mistake, obviously.”

  Park took a breath. Her explanation of this was crucial, or else he would think her insane. Though she wasn’t sure he had a choice in sticking with her anyway, even if she was.

  “Keep in mind that I’m only relaying what Taban said,” she warned him. “I haven’t had time to parse through the logic of it on my own.”

  Sagara inclined his head in assent. “I’m not in a position to pass judgment,” he said. “I just need to understand—or try to, anyway—so we can survive.”

  So Park began.

  She told him about Taban’s story, what little she could piece together of it: how the human Taban had been stranded on Eos with his partner, how the unity rain had distorted things around them. How they had been looking for the Fold, trying for mountains when they were really forging toward rifts in space. When she hesitantly mentioned it was possible—just possible—that something of his human existence really could be enduring inside the HARE, merged with it, rather than the machine simply imitating him, Sagara made a noise. But he didn’t interrupt her, so she plowed on.

  She told him about the other things Taban had said: how the unity rain didn’t affect just space and time, but also consciousness. How the victims of the nightmares had been assimilated with the androids of the ship, suffering hellish experiences where their minds believed their bodies lacked lungs, and tongues, and any semblance of autonomy. How they’d experienced what it was to be, essentially, both living and dead.

  And how the androids, in turn, had slowly become more human-like as a result of their exposure, jerking away from their programming and protocols like creatures emerging from chrysalises. Megex swearing, Park remembered then, and Jimex telling her to run from Boone, and all of them learning from each other, exchanging data, knowledge, a kind of accelerated evolution happening right under everyone’s noses . . .

  “I think because Taban has been so exposed to the unity rain, they look to him as a sort of leader,” she said. “Part-human, part-machine consciousness. And possibly even the unity rain responds differently to him, merging his ‘intention’ with the minds of others in a way that doesn’t make him—crazy. That might have been what happened to Holt as well as Keller. Taban wanted out, the unity rain merged their thoughts and experiences together, and Holt tried to let him out. And Hunter, too; Taban was controlling her, maybe unconsciously, so that she was trying to figure out a way to let him out from the bridge. She said that someone had told her to do it, but she couldn’t say who or when.”

  “And then when the two of you experienced that gravity malfunction,” Sagara said slowly, “that might have been an effect of this . . . unity rain?”

  Park nodded. “That, and a few other times I’ve been on the ship and lost my way. Or found that the hallways were rearranged. Like what happened to us during the blackout.”

  Sagara regarded her; she couldn’t read his thoughts again. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

  Park stared at him. “Would you have? I couldn’t even trust that it was really happening, not at first. I thought that I was tired. And with what was happening to everyone else, experiencing delusions didn’t seem like the ideal thing to talk about.”

  Sagara snorted, but he made a gesture as if to tell her to proceed.

  “It might have happened to Ellenex, too,” Park said. “The androids said, in very cryptic tones, that Ellenex tried to free Taban, and the ‘devil’—meaning Chanur—caught her and destroyed her for it.” She shook her head. “He has some other connection with the androids, too. Taban, I mean. They’ve formed some kind of mythology around him, incorporated his ‘dreams’ into their own databases and knowledge referentials. They call him the sleeping god.” She left out what they called her—and that they had apparently absorbed things from her dreams, too. “They become more sentient the longer this whole thing goes on. Maybe that’s why Natalya’s always wanted to get rid of them. She might have sensed it.”

  “Natalya didn’t sense a damn thing,” Sagara answered dryly. “Neither did any of us—except you. She just hates the robots because most people hate them.”

  “Why do people hate them, though?” Park asked, feeling stubborn. “What have they ever done to anybody?”

  “They’re different,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  “Not so different, though,” she insisted. “They’re just like us, in many ways.”

  Now Sagara laughed softly. “Just another reason to be afraid,” he remarked.

  Then he shook his head. “I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of all of this. You seem to accept it so readily, but how could consciousness be something that’s affected—let alone merged—by this phenomenon?”

  “Perhaps collapsed is a more helpful word,” Park said. At his look she said, “Or compressed. You accept that the Fold—or various forces, really—collapse or compress together space, don’t you? Or gravity?”

  “I suppose,” Sagara said reluctantly. “But consciousness isn’t gravity.”

  “It depends on how you look at it,” Park said. Her head spun with the effort, but she could feel herself thinking hard, the rotors of her brain working overtime. “If we’re going by Taban’s hypothesis, consciousness, like gravity, is an invisible force that has an influence on the external world. Unlike gravity, we haven’t made the appropriate steps to prove it—but we are aware of its effects. We know that particles on a quantum level change their behavior when being observed—that the very act
of observation, by human or machine, changes something fundamental about them. We know that human intention influences how plants and fruit flies in otherwise identical environments grow; that it can affect the molecular vibration or pH of water samples; that it can seemingly cause tumors to shrink, or the bio-photons in leaves to respond and glow. Why has the ‘placebo effect’—in other words, the human power of belief—had such a marked and undeniable impact on all the studies we’ve ever conducted? Why has it cured physical illness, or . . . why can monks make fields of animals simultaneously move around or lie down just by staring at them, thinking at them? Why does the identical clone of a rat, when told it’s stupid, behave so poorly in a maze, when it’s otherwise treated exactly the same as its clone that was told that it’s smart? And panpsychism has existed as a philosophical concept for, what, thousands of years?” She cleared her throat, aware of the thumping in the back of her head. “Looking at all of that, I would say that consciousness could be a force, a field—even a dimension of its own, higher than time and space—”

  “—perceiving and defining both,” Sagara echoed along with her.

  Park paused and licked her lips. She could not remember ever talking so much without interruption.

  He remained silent, utterly still—only the slight tapping of his fingers belied his uneasiness. Park forged on: “It’s a possibility that we’ve been aware of for a long time; but no one’s taken it further. Or others haven’t taken it seriously enough, I suppose. There was an experiment a long time ago, where a group of students shot a wave of electrons at a barrier with little openings in it. When behaving as a wave, the electrons could simultaneously pass through several of the openings in the barrier and then meet again on the other side. But this behavior could only occur when no one was actively watching. When a human observer began to watch the electrons passing through the barrier, suddenly things were drastically different. If one electron passed through one opening, then clearly it didn’t go through another; the electrons now behaved like individual particles, not a wave. In essence, the mere presence of observation—particularly conscious observation, as observation by an electronic detector didn’t produce this effect—forced the electrons to behave like particles, the way a human mind expected them to behave. But when left to their own devices, without the presence of a live observer, the electrons behaved as a wave again. But why? What about observation does that? It’s almost as if we’re defining that particle by observing it, being aware and conscious of it. That is a force that has an observable effect, even if we can’t fully explain it.”